Ozzy Osbourne (1948-2025): Prince of darkness or man of faith?

He’s nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, fronting a band called Black Sabbath. He’s famous for biting the head off a bat and a dove. He tried to kill his wife while on drugs, failed at burglary when a TV fell on his head, has been to jail, dipped his testicles in a glass of wine at a record company dinner, and urinated on the Alamo in Texas, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site and former Catholic mission.

So why does Ozzy Osbourne get an obit on a Christian site?

For starters – particularly when he is asked whether his band is Satanic – he consistently rejects that, and affirms he believes in God. As he told The Guardian in 2014, “I’m a Christian. I was christened as a Christian. I used to go to Sunday school.”

The misunderstandings began with the band’s name. Inspired by a Boris Karloff movie, “Black Sabbath” is the title of their most popular song when they started out, so they took it on as a moniker. (It made particular sense in an era when band names featured colours – think Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, etc). But that track is no invitation to Satanism; rather, it is a warning to stay away.

Osbourne told The New York Times that he prayed before every show

On their third album Master of Reality – sandwiched between the career highlights of Paranoid and Sabbath Vol.4 –sits a track called ‘After Forever’ which includes the lyrics: “Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you? / Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school? / Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say if they knew you believe in God above? / They should realise before they criticise that God is the only way to love / Perhaps you’ll think before you say that God is dead and gone / Open your eyes, just realise that he’s the one / The only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate.”

It is a track covered by Christian metal pioneers Stryper without changing a word. While the lyrics were penned by bassist Geezer Butler, Ozzy is the one singing them.

There are parallels with fellow shock-rock artist Alice Cooper, who grew up as a pastor’s kid and has been consistent in expressing his own Christian faith, including this past weekend in The Times. Cooper has always made clear that he is Alice when on stage, but is Vince Furnier (his birth name) off it. While not as actively passionate about his faith as that, Osbourne makes clear that he is Ozzy on stage and John Osbourne off it.

It’s theatre. As he remarked to Entertainment Tonight in 1981, “Does Christopher Lee play golf with vampire’s teeth? Do these people who do horror movies walk around with black cloaks on every day of the week? It’s just a role I’m playing.” And when you have an image, there are plenty of marketing executives ensuring that you make the most of it.

Early life

Considering his background helps to understand this dichotomy. He grew up in a working class family in Birmingham, in a house reportedly without running water, to a non-practicing Catholic mother and a nominally Church of England father, and attended a C of E school. Culturally, he imbibed a background knowledge of the faith and its values.

Being dyslexic when it wasn’t widely understood or diagnosed, and being bullied were probably factors in his teenage suicide attempts. He struggled with authority and self-confidence, leaving school at 15 and taking such menial jobs as construction site labourer, car factory horn-tuner, and slaughterhouse worker.

Inspired by The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’, he saw that his way out would be to make it as a musician. Teaming up with Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward as Earth, later to become Black Sabbath, he found his niche. The band virtually invented heavy metal and hit success quickly. Then the story becomes cliché: fame brings money, women and drugs, leading to dependency, then implosion.

Black Sabbath virtually invented heavy metal

Rehab

After Ozzy was fired from the band, Sabbath’s manager sent his daughter Sharon to keep an eye on him. They married and she became his rock through all the rehabs and beyond.

Another pioneering effort was their 2002-2005 MTV reality show The Osbournes, where he came across as normal father, if somewhat doddery and bemused by microwaves.

Osbourne told The New York Times in 1992 that he prayed before every show and the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy ends with him closing the door and kneeling down alone in prayer.

Acknowledging a ‘higher power’ is often a key part of rehab and in a recent TikTok, he is asked about something on his desk. He replies, “That’s the serenity prayer. I say that to keep me sober.”

Just like us

In recent years, he suffered a catalogue of health issues, including a quad bike accident that nearly paralysed him and a Parkinson’s diagnosis.

The impression he leaves is of an ordinary man with a basic faith, who stumbled across a way out of the poverty he grew up with and feels permanently grateful for the opportunity, motivated by the live connection with his fans, who’d see him as ‘just like us’.

It fuelled his support for young artists in his Ozzfest tours, and the respect he earned from the metal community showed in his all-star swansong ‘Back to the Beginning’ reunion gig with the original Sabbath line-up at his beloved Villa Park in Birmingham, less than three weeks before his death. He ended that as usual with a heartfelt “God bless you”.

Watch his interviews; he is just a simple guy with ADHD, who had very little going for him, ended up being rich and famous, struggled with all the pressures that come with that, and who ultimately gets pleasure from having fun with his fans. Impulsive, he doesn’t think things through. So it is no surprise that he wasn’t a radical disciple. But he did seem to have a faith, when he could so often and so easily discarded or denied it.

To parody a famous line: he wasn’t the Prince of Darkness; he’d just been a very naughty boy.

John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne died at home on 22 July, surrounded by family.